This is an intimate biography of an artist who became a legend after his death, but who in his private life stands revealed as a troubled man who was, in many ways, his own victim.Joan Murray’s new biography is part detective work, too: she investigates his beliefs, and the origins of his great masterpieces, and provides a convincing description of the possible circumstances of his death.The art of Tom Thomson represents one of the high points of Canadian modernism, which f...

This is a true story. Harley (a beagle/lab mix) was Ms. Joan's best friend. She adopted him from a local shelter when she retired from the military. Harley was always there for Ms. Joan. While getting certified as a teacher, Ms. Joan would leave the house early and return late at night, and Harley would be there waiting for her, smiling and happy to see her.Harley developed mast cell cancer in his front left paw. To save him, the doctors amputated (cut off) half of his front paw. A...

In this witty and compelling defence of the art field itself, Joan Murray, one of the country’s most outspoken art historians, discusses the great figures of Canadian art and the rise of our national are in institutions such as the Art Gallery of Ontario.

The first appearance of this award-winning writer's work since the 1940s, this collection, which includes an introduction by John Ashbery, restores Joan Murray's striking poetry to its originally intended form.Though John Ashbery hailed Joan Murray as a key influence on his work, Murray’s sole collection, Poems, published after her death at the early age of twenty-four and selected by W. H. Auden for inclusion in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, has been ...

The Winter 2015-16 issue of Ploughshares. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Two out of each year's three issues are guest-edited by prominent writers who explore different personal visions, aesthetics, and literary circles, with the Winter issue staff-edited.The stories, poems, and essays that comprise this staff-edited issue of Ploughshares are diverse and timely. Visit a South African laundromat in Laurie Baker’s short story, Here I Am, Laughing with Boers;...

Tom Thomson (1877-1917) occupies a prominent position in Canada's national culture and has become a celebrated icon for his magnificent landscapes as well as for his brief life and mysterious death. The shy, enigmatic artist and woodsman's innovative painting style produced such seminal Canadian images as The Jack Pine and The West Wind, while his untimely drowning nearly a century ago is still a popular subject of fierce debate.Originally a commercial artist, Tho...

The mesmerizing bestseller that combines the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt and the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock—A New York Times Ten Best Book of the YearSpecial Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age tale and a richly plotted suspense story, told with dazzling intelligence and wit. At the center of the novel is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic know...

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction PrizeA Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How shou...

Twenty of the best American short stories of 2011, chosen by the New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Chord.The twenty tightly crafted stories collected here by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Geraldine Brooks are full of deftly drawn characters, universal truths, and often surprising humor. Richard Powers's "To the Measures Fall" is a comic meditation on the uses of literature in the course of a life. In the satirical "The Sleep," Caitlin...

"Twenty masterfully crafted short stories" by T.C. Boyle, Emma Cline, Mary Gaitskill, and more: "Outstanding and well worth the read." — Booklist (starred review)"To read their stories felt to me the way I suspect other people feel hearing jazz for the first time," recalls Curtis Sittenfeld of her initial encounter with the Best American Short Stories series. "They were windows into emotions I had and hadn't had, into other settings and circumstances and ob...

“Beautiful. The human condition is on full display in these glimpses of our essential connectedness. Perfect for our times.”—Dani Shapiro, author of InheritanceSixty-five extraordinary writers grapple with this mystery: How can an ephemeral encounter with a stranger leave such an eternal mark?When Colleen Kinder put out a call for authors to write a letter to a stranger about an unforgettable encounter, she opened the floodgates. Th...

Curated by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild, this volume shares intimate perspectives from some of today's most acclaimed writers.As Cheryl Strayed explains in her introduction, "the invisible, unwritten last line of every essay should be and nothing was ever the same again." The reader, in other words, should feel the ground shift, if even only a bit. In this edition of the acclaimed anthology series, Strayed has gathered ...